Jerusalem Poker jq-2

by Edward Whittemore

  Cairo smiled more broadly. Munk stopped and stared at him.

  You're saying you think the bottles are genuine?

  Yes.

  Imported into the Holy Land by the Knights Hospitalers early in the twelfth century?

  Strictly for medicinal purposes, answered Cairo, laughing.

  Munk took out his watch and clicked open the face that showed no time. For a moment he gazed at it.

  Then you're also saying Joe has discovered a hidden wine cellar that once belonged to the Knights?

  But where?

  Cairo raised his patent-leather slipper and gently tapped the cobblestones where they were walking.

  Down there? Somewhere beneath the city?

  Very far beneath it, I would think. Jerusalem has come and gone several times since then and they've always rebuilt the city over the ruins.

  Munk stopped and gazed down at the cobblestones.

  Caverns of the past? But how could he have found a way into them? If they were known to exist people would have been looking for them for centuries.

  Perhaps there was only one man who knew they existed and Joe learned the secret from him. A man no one else has ever believed or even listened to.

  Munk put his watch away. They walked on in silence for a time.

  Obviously Haj Harun, said Munk.

  It seems likely.

  But he's mad.

  Of course.

  He even claims he's lived three thousand years.

  Which is why no one listens to him. But tell me, Munk, would you be interested in the caverns if that's what they are?

  Not really. Futures are my specialty, as you know.

  Yes, a new Jewish homeland. I know.

  And what about you? asked Munk.

  Not my line either. In my own way I'm looking to the future too.

  For what?

  Justice, said Cairo with a smile. He removed a small gold container from under his robe and extracted a pinch of dust. He sniffed and the pupils of his clear blue eyes dilated. The muscles around his mouth relaxed in a familiar manner. The two of them had emerged from an alley near Jaffa Gate.

  It's quite extraordinary the effect mummy dust has on you, Munk commented dryly.

  Cairo smiled into the distance and nodded gently as they separated to go their different ways.

  PART THREE

  -9-

  Nubar Wallenstein

  Nothing less than a vast criminal organization operating throughout the Balkans, its scheming employees chosen by Nubar solely for their abilities in intrigue and intimidation, burglary and embezzlement.

  In the tower room of the Albanian castle where his grandfather had memorized Bibles early in the nineteenth century, Nubar Wallenstein sat brooding over a report that suggested the possible existence of yet another obscure treatise written by the most renowned alchemist in history, Bombastus von Hohenheim, more often remembered as Paracelsus.

  Nubar's library contained all the works commonly attributed to the great sixteenth-century Swiss master, and in addition thousands of smudged pages that were either forged or illegible. Acquired over the last six years, the collection represented an immense effort by his network of agents in the Balkans.

  Paracelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim.

  Hohenheim Paracelsus von Bombastus.

  To Nubar, those syllables held mystical implications, sonorous suggestions of secret knowledge that had immediately captivated him when first he came across them, in 1921, at the age of fifteen.

  Indulged as always by his grandmother, Sophia, he had begun writing to literary dealers and bibliophiles throughout the Balkans, offering huge sums of money for any works by Paracelsus that they could procure. Fortunes had changed drastically in the Great War. Powerful families had sunk into ruin, estates had been broken up. The tracts and treatises flowed in and before the end of the year, due to Sophia's enormous wealth and influence, Nubar had owned the largest collection of Paracelsus in the world.

  But for Nubar the largest collection of Paracelsus wasn't enough. While growing up in the ancestral Wallenstein castle in Albania, Nubar had early fallen victim to those traditional suspicions and rampant fears that had plagued the first Wallenstein master of the castle in the seventeenth century, and thereafter all the Skanderbeg Wallensteins save for the last, Nubar's grandfather, a fanatical renegade Trappist monk who had discovered an ancient manuscript in the Sinai that was in fact the oldest Bible in the world. His horrified grandfather had found that Bible untenable in every respect, denying every religious truth ever held by anyone, and out of piety had proceeded to forge an acceptable original that could provide grounds for faith.

  Parabastus Hohencelsus von Bombheim.

  Fear in the case of the first Albanian Wallenstein that the enemies of his murdered uncle, the once all-powerful Generalissimo of the Holy Roman Empire, were sending out spies to kill him.

  Suspicion in the case of subsequent Skanderbegs, those illiterate warriors who had spent their lives away from the castle fighting in any army that would have them, because they were incapable of combining love with sensual pleasure and were therefore impotent with their wives, able to be aroused sexually only by very young girls of eight or nine.

  Suspicion feeding on itself and eventually giving birth to its own reality as successive Skanderbegs, who when young had always sensed that their fathers were strangers, grew up and came to know for a fact that their own sons were fathered by strangers, a terrible burden of isolation causing lifelong instability, the sons fatherless and the fathers sonless generation after generation in the family's dark dank castle perched gloomily on a wild Albanian crag, a windy and insecure Balkan outpost in the precarious marches separating Christian Europe from the Moslem realm of the Turks.

  Hohenbomb von Celsus Paraheim.

  Excessive doubts and traditional fears harrying Nubar as they had harried Wallenstein men for centuries, those unrelated and suspicious warriors who had violently distrusted everyone at home while imagining extravagant plots against them abroad. Vague yet pervasive plots that explained all events on earth. The entire universe, as they saw it, secretly arrayed against these insignificant masters of a remote Albanian castle.

  And so too Nubar, even though his grandmother, Sophia, still ran the castle as she had for the last seventy-five years, ever since her common-law husband, Nubar's grandfather, had returned home from his stupendous labors in the Holy Land, broken and insane. Nubar sensed those same plots from the past and he could no more control his fear of them than keep his left eyelid from drooping when he was excited, another affliction of the first Wallenstein master of the castle that had subsequently been visited upon all Wallenstein males.

  Inexplicably so. For since none of the Wallenstein males had been related prior to the time of Nubar's grandfather, how could they possibly share such specific characteristics?

  The question had never been answered, and with good reason. Because to do so would have been to admit acausal relationships in the Balkans, influences removed from logic which would have been highly confusing in their disorderly ramifications, and had therefore always been thoughtfully ignored as nonexistent.

  Hohenbastus von Heim Parabomb.

  Or in short, Paracelsus, the master alchemist of all time.

  Briefly professor of medicine at the University of Basle early in the sixteenth century. Forced to leave because of his defiance of tradition, which took the form of explaining things that had never been explained, relating things that had never been related, and conversely, unrelating other things that had always been seen as tightly wedded. In general, then, wreaking havoc throughout the entire shadowy terrain that lay between cause and effect.

  Brilliant and eccentric and quarrelsome, renaming himself Paracelsus because he felt the name he had been born with was insufficient for his needs. Prodigiously learned, vitriolic in debate and psychotically self-confident, believer in the four Greek elements of earth and air and fire and water, and the three Arab principles, m
ercury and salt and sulphur. Discoverer of the philosopher's stone which would allow him to live forever. Successively a profound scholar, a miner, a mixer of metals in dim cellar laboratories, a dreaming wanderer, a political radical, a barefoot Christian mystic.

  And finally the magus himself, Faust, first modern scientist of the soul. The genius who first used minerals to treat internal diseases, who scorned remedies such as bloodletting and purging and sweating.

  Unswerving advocate of opium and mercury compounds in search of the spirit.

  Celsusheim Parahohen von Bomb.

  Nubar hadn't been satisfied to have the largest collection of the magus's works, he had to have all of them. Because if he didn't it meant that someone, somewhere, would have the power to plot against him, to use an unknown page of the master alchemist's conjectural knowledge to harm him.

  Once more Sophia had indulged him, this time providing him with unlimited funds to hire full-time literary agents whose job, as Nubar innocently explained it, would be to track down the lesser known works of Paracelsus and buy them.

  Admirable, thought Sophia. For a boy in his sixteenth year, he's already displaying his grandfather's scholarly bent to a remarkable degree.

  But in fact Nubar wasn't scholarly at all. His bent was elsewhere and his network of literary agents had soon expanded into a private intelligence service with its own complete hierarchy of control centers and agents and informers, nothing less than a vast criminal organization operating throughout the Balkans, its scheming employees chosen by Nubar solely for their abilities in intrigue and intimidation, burglary and embezzlement.

  This had been necessary because the works Nubar now sought were either so rare or so treasured by their owners no amount of money could buy them. They could only be extorted from their owners, or failing that, stolen.

  Thus for the last six years, since the closing days of 1921, Nubar had been regularly receiving secret reports in his Albanian headquarters, the tower room of the ancestral Wallenstein castle. These reports he studied suspiciously before issuing the daily directives to his agents that would eventually lead to another illegal acquisition, by blackmail or bludgeoning, from a monastery in Macedonia or a book-dealer in Bulgaria, or perhaps from a private library in Transylvania.

  Celsus Heimbomb von Bastus.

  When Nubar had founded his criminal organization in 1921, he had decided to name it the Uranist Intelligence Agency, because it pleased him to associate himself with the Greek sky-god Uranus, the personification of heaven and the first ruler of the universe, and the father as well of those deformed creatures of old, the cyclops and the furies.

  Hulking mindless shepherds with their single round eyes fixated on the hindquarters of retreating sheep?

  Frenzied raving women so grotesque they had snakes for hair?

  Yes, the images pleased Nubar. Their implications were close to his heart, and thus he had chosen Uranus for the name of his secret network.

  And also because he knew that if any planet guided his destiny it would have to be Uranus, remote and mysterious, its true nature unknown, its astrological sign a variation of the male symbol, twisted, punctuated with a black hole.

  Paraho von Bomb von Heim. Eternal Bombastus.

  Since the agents of the UIA came from the most disreputable elements in the Balkans, it was inevitable they couldn't all be professional criminals. Naturally there were also clever charlatans lurking in the ranks, along with the outright quacks and impostors, unctuous fabricators whose only talents lay in inventing ever more intricate and fantastic schemes for squandering Nubar's money.

  Nubar was aware of this. He knew perfectly well that his network had given rise to a whole new industry in the Balkans in the 1920s, the marketing of fake Paracelsus treatises and tracts by unscrupulous entrepreneurs who pretended they were selling him translations of original works that had been lost.

  In order to mislead him these forgeries were often concocted in obscure languages such as Basque and Lettish, occasionally in dead local languages such as Old Church Slavonic, and at least once in a tongue so remote and archaic no one who ever spoke it could possibly have heard of Paracelsus, a ludicrous gibberish from central Asia known to scholars as Tokharian B.

  Yet Nubar was so obsessed with Paracelsus he always paid in the end to have these outrageous forgeries checked by experts, this profitable sideline for academics being another whole industry he had created in the Balkans in the postwar period. For Nubar invariably preferred to waste money on a worthless sheaf of nonsense, no matter how illegible, rather than take the chance of letting one authentic remnant of the master slip by him.

  Bombast Paraheim von Celsusho.

  Nubar turned away from his workbench to gaze at the enormous sword that stood in the corner of his tower room, a replica of the one the great doctor had brought back with him from his mysterious travels in the Middle East, before he had gone to work in some Venetian mercury mines on the Dalmation coast, exact location unspecified, perhaps not that far from the Wallenstein castle.

  The great doctor had claimed the sword was given to him by a hangman. In its hollow pommel he had stored a supply of his wonder drug, laudanum, made from a recipe acquired in Constantinople.

  Laudanum had been Paracelsus' most valued treasure, and as a result he had never parted from his sword, not even in his sleep.

  Nubar also kept laudanum in the hollow pommel of his sword and he also never slept without it, cold and hard and comforting as it was with him in bed at night.

  Parabast Celsen von Heimbomb.

  On his workbench lay several volumes of the master's Philosophia Sagax, and others of the Arch-wisdom. Nubar owned dozens of copies of both works and all the copies violently disagreed with one another. Paragraphs were misplaced or truncated, changing the meaning entirely. Formulae contradicted each other and proposals cancelled out each other. Whole pages were missing here, entire chapters added there. In short, a maze of discrepancies.

  One problem was that the great doctor had never read anything he wrote, preferring to leave that task to others.

  Then too, many of the works published under his name were transcripts of his lectures that had been recorded by dazed students, or dictations he had given to inept amanuenses, who hadn't been able to keep up with the master's brilliantly explosive diatribes. So scholars were in complete disagreement over which books should be recognized as genuine.

  It was as if this great doctor of the soul, the magus, Faust, after penetrating all the mysteries, had thrown the ingredients of his knowledge into the air to let them reshape themselves in endless variations through the centuries, the indisputable truths he propounded forever as profuse and contradictory as life itself.

  In addition, causing yet more confusion, were the code words.

  Like all the alchemists of his era, the great Swiss master had disguised his discoveries by using metaphors to describe his successful methods for transforming base metals into gold. Thus soul and chaos could also mean gold. And chaos might mean essence or gas. As sulphur might mean gas. Or chaos used to indicate a certain element he didn't wish to name at the moment. While mercury was the first heaven of the metaphysical heavens to come.

  Heimbomb Celsushohen von Para.

  Discrepancies, clues, cryptology.

  Omitted references in the sixteenth century.

  Incomprehensible additions and deletions made by dazed scribes suffering from poor candlelight, weak from unbalanced diets, given to sudden attacks of vertigo as they struggled through the night with pen and paper in vaulted medieval laboratories, hopelessly trying to record the great doctor's mutterings, his whispered arcane wisdom that rose with the fumes spiraling up from his vast array of pelicans and alembics, crucibles and athanors.

  Dizzy scribes numbly scribbling in the smoke as the great doctor now loomed up in the shadows, now shrank back in the shadows, now disappeared altogether in the darkness behind his workbench, mumbling as he sank out of sight, only to rear up a minute later
in the haze in front of his workbench, bellowing out eternal formulae and startling truths that had never been heard anywhere before that moment. While all the time explaining the secrets of Mercury, both the god of knowledge and of the marketplace, and mercury the cure for syphilis and mercury the mother of metals, to be purified before long up through the seven stages to the gold of the seventh heaven. Gas and chaos and soul.

  Gas, the magus. Chaos, the soul. Faust in the fumes peering into his pelicans and alembics, igniting ever new secret solutions in the crucibles and athanors of time.

  Hohenbastus von Heim von Ho.

  The gas erupted inside Nubar with a roar. A powerful fart lifted him off his chair. He belched loudly, painfully, and fell back in his chair to quiver through the diminishing explosions of thumping farts and fiery belches that were racing from his stomach in all directions, unloading his gas into the air.

  Mercury poisoning, and merely one of its symptoms, the result of his chronic alchemical experiments with that metal. Certainly an excessive inhalation of mercury fumes over the years could be harmful, perhaps even dangerous. But Nubar accepted that possibility, knowing it was unavoidable when in pursuit of the great doctor's secrets.

  Merely one of the symptoms, there were others. Gastrointestinal inflammation. Excessive saliva and excessive gas. Urinary complications. Tremors. Skin ulcers. Mental depression.

  The master, chaos. The soul of secret fumes, a fart, gaseous gold, to be purified up to seventh heaven.

  Magus and mystery, in short.

  Ho Parabastus von Heimenbomb.

  After six years laboring in his tower room, Nubar sometimes gloomily wondered whether he would ever reach his goal. How could he acquire all the great doctor's works when scholars couldn't decide which were genuine? When forging the master had become an entire industry in the Balkans? When analyzing those forgeries had become another entire industry? Both of those industries aimed at Nubar, exclusively supported by him. Whole armies of quacks and scholars living off his obsession.

  Sagax, for example. Which was the correct version? Was there a correct version or were they all equally correct? Equally incorrect?